Your Art

//Death is your art. You make it with your hands, day after day.//

You think I don't know what you feel, who you are? You think I don't see? I see. I look into your eyes and I fall into vast emptiness. And you can turn your eyes away, but I know now, I know that inside you here's a black hole which is bottomless. You hide it but you can't hide it from me; the void in me knows the void in you. I see how you're dead. All you see is grey and you don't remember how you got where you are, you don't know how you've walked through the day. You're stone, hard and cold, and you try so hard to feel but it's just blankness. Never thought you could feel this dead in life, and you died and you were brought back to life but you don't feel alive. When you smile all you do is move your mouth, and your eyes are blank. Love is something you feel at a distance, you're aware you have it but you couldn't say what it means. At least it's not exactly pain, because you can't feel that either. Numbness, and you're tired, so tired, you can't bring yourself to care about anything.

Maybe you can hide it from Red, from Xander, but you can't hide it from me. I know, because you're me now. Oh, I haven't been alive in a long, long time and I'm watching you every day, watching you slide down into the abyss. Well, like I said, at least it isn't pain. Most of the time. Though there can be a dull and vast despair, that wrenches deep down in you. The shades of grey darken.

Yeah, I know what you'd say. //You told me I was just like you. That I was holding it in.// //Ready to cut loose?// //Try me.// //OK then. Give us a kiss.// Well, you're sure cutting loose now. What, you think cause you haven't killed anyone yet you're better than me? You do what I do. Remember how we used to talk. //Now it's strictly get some, get gone.// And you looked bemused, couldn't understand how I could think that way, because you only used the expression "making love". Look where that got you, though. And there's not much way you can defend what you do with Spike. I guess you think that's a secret, but you've never been good at keeping secrets. What's that, then? So now you know the value of get some, get gone. Face it, B, your life's going down the pan, it's just a pile of shit. Reduced to fucking a vampire you hate cause it's the only thing that you can feel. And he loves you so he'll come running; you're using him, but who am I to judge? //Use 'em and lose 'em.// I see the bruises where you've covered them up. Danger, why else? //You got the lust, and I'm not just talking about screwing vampires,// Yeah, and now you can't tell me he's got a soul cause Spike's as evil as he ever was. You get off on knowing that, though, that he wants to kill you as much as he wants to fuck you. Thrills. I know all about 'em, B. You can't keep away from the fire, you dance with it, the flames lick you and you feel their burns. It'll do, it's a sensation. It breaks in through the dead thickness.

//Every guy, from Manimal to Mr I Love The English Patient, has beast in him. I don't care how sensitive they act. They're all just in it for the chase.// Not just the guys, the girls too, and you want more Manimal than Mr I Love The English Patient. Angel was dancing on a knife edge, you knew what he could be. Riley was no good for you, he was white bread and it wasn't enough. Spike and me though, we're all about the blaze. You think I couldn't take a knife and plunge it in you? You think I wouldn't? No, you know better than that. I could kill you as you lay sleeping, follow the lines my fingers made with a knife. Where is that knife now? Maybe it's buried in the rubble of the high school. It haunts me, I dream about it; I though I could escape it by repenting and spending a while locked up, but when I close my eyes you thrust it in my gut again and again. I shudder when you stroke the scar, caressing the wound you made. Just like always, fucking with me, oh-so-casually reminding me of your power.

Yeah, I could kill you any time. Maybe I will. Maybe next time when I'm fucking you I'll stab you as you come. Watch that look of ecstasy turn to shock, twist the knife, thrust it further in and lick off the blood. I wish. I fucking wish, cause if I could do that then my problems wouldn't be so bad. But let's face it, I always do everything for you. I couldn't even kill you when I had the fucking chance. You know well enough that love always turns to shit. Hell, love is shit. So maybe it's just good that you haven't fallen again. I tried to escape you but it always comes back to you, I can't keep away. Every time you want me I come, like a fucking lapdog. Pathetic. Well, it backfired when I told you to cut loose. Now I know. It's so trite but when you wake up in the morning and leave, with your eyes so damn cold, it's like the bottom falls out of me. I feel the knife inside me, you wrench out my insides over and over. Pain dull and stabbing, so much larger than me, as if the sky is falling and crushing me. I want to leave you but I could never leave you.

I know why you do it. When your mouth is open and crushing against mine, when your hands are roving over my body I feel it in you, your eyes are desperate and sinking into relief. You fall into the oblivion of desire. Searching all the time for that moment of bliss to end the grey. And you'll keep coming back cause that's what you've sunk to. It's a high, B, an addiction like any other.

I told you all this time what slaying does to you. //Isn't it crazy how slaying just always makes you hungry and horny?// Now you believe me, now you've given in. I see how you turn to me after staking those vamps, sweating and breathing heavy, how your eyes are hot and hungry, and you pull me to you; you want to rip my clothes off me right there, and hey, who am I to complain? //She got me really wound up. A fight like that, and no kill... I'm about ready to pop.// You know why, though, don't you, or maybe you haven't connected the dots yet. It's one of the things you like to deny, you don't like to contemplate with your so-pure mind. Slaying a vampire, though, that's classic Freud. The stake goes in, the vamp explodes: it's very simple and you know your birds and bees. Oh yes, love, slaying's just sex. //Tell me you don't get off on this!// Thrills and adrenaline, rushes and highs. You get off on the power, you get off on the kill. Wild like a stalking beast, licking off the blood of the prey and fucking by the ripped remains. //You ever hear them saying the blood of a Slayer is a powerful aphrodisiac?// Well what else did you expect? You know where we come from. We come from feral roots. Darkness, oh yes, deep caves and blood and primal war cries. //No friends. Just the kill. We are the kill.// And that's why you're not gonna go with anyone else. We're the same. We share the kill, and don't kid yourself that you don't want to go further, cause you do. //To feel the future, a world of possibilities snuffed out by your own hand... I know the power, the exhilaration. It was like a drug for me.// Never felt anything like it, standing above a body, seeing the life drain out of if, knowing it was me. Maybe you should try it sometime.

Oh, that's right, you did. //What's the matter? All that killing and you're afraid to die?// Don't tell me you didn't feel a rush when you stuck the knife in. I know you too well. Dizzy whirling in my head, incredible high, and oh, the power. And beneath me the world opened up wide; I soared off and flew down. Was engulfed by a new world, one of blackness and screams, tortured souls crying out for mercy. //To kill without remorse is to feel like a god. But you're not a god. You're not much more than a girl.// yeah, it was too much for me. Cause, baby, what goes up gotta come down. I became the beast, I was the kill, the dark I walked in entered me. Too wild, too untamed, and eventually you cross a line which is too much danger. Blood, blood on my hands and I can't get it off. Sick all though me.

So yeah. I came back. It's still in me, though, the animal, and it's in you too. //We're warriors. We're built to kill.// You know who you are cause you can see it in you. Savage. Mindless. And that's another thing about the beast. The beast doesn't feel. Nothing except the animal fire of the kill. The greyer you get, the closer you are to it. //Yeah. Strength, resilience - those are all words for hardness. I'm starting to feel like being the Slayer is turning me into stone.// You can deny it but your denials are getting hollow. Admit it, you know. You're far away from everyone now except me and the demons. We're more like the vampires than we are like the humans. The Slayer takes us over and changes us.

I see you and I know. Your eyes are dead except for vestiges of wild behind them; you've given in cause you're too tired to resist the inevitable. //The Slayer does not walk in this world.// Yeah. You're me now.

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